> in summary, the "namespaces in xml"
recommendation's specifications with regard to "names

> which are not in any namespace" are unnecessarily
and unreasonably paradoxical.

Absolutely. James Clark got round this
quite neatly in XPath 1.0, I think, by referring to the "thing that is not a
namespace" as "the null namespace". We need a name for it, and we can use that
phrase without having to agree on whether the thing is or is not a
namespace.